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Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime Now Available for Pre-Order

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime is now available for pre-order in several United States and Canadian retail stores.

Amazon, B&H, Best Buy, GameStop and Tiger Direct are some of the retailers that will take pre-orders for the Transformer Prime in the U.S.

Canadian customers can get their hands on Asus' tablet at Future Shop and NCIX.

Two versions of this new tablet will be offered to customers.

The 32 GB editions will cost $499, while the 64 GB version will go for the price of $599. The colors that the tablets will be available in are Amethyst Gray and Champagne.

An additional full-sized keyboard and trackpad will be sold for $149. The name of this add-on is the "TF-201 Keyboard Dock," and it comes in the same two colors listed above.

The Transformer Prime will come with a Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor, 10.1-inch touchscreen with resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels, 1-gigabyte of RAM, 8-megapixel rear camera with an LED flash and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. It will also sport an HDMI port for hooking the tablet to HD TVs and a microSD card slot for expanding storage.

Asus' upcoming tablet will also be one of the first tablets to run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Currently, it runs on Android 3.2 Honeycomb.

"With Android 3.2 Honeycomb (upgradable to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich) OS with Adobe Flash support and over 500,000 downloadable applications on the Android Market, entertainment is just a finger swipe away,” said the tablet’s official website.

The website Asustablets.us has a link that specifies the pre-order options for the device.

For those who would like to own the Transformer Prime free of charge, Asus is running a contest on the website show above. The website advises users to "follow @ASUS on Twitter and send a Tweet including @ASUS and hash tag #TransformerPrime to enter."